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You do realize that RFC 3986 doesn’t actually match reality, right? http://url.spec.whatwg.org/#goals

That's for parsing a "well-formed" URI, not validating a URI as well-formed in the first place, however :)

That doesn't work for validation.

Of course it does, if that regular expression matches we have a valid URI. It's silly what gets downvoted on HN these days.

No, it doesn't. This regular expression matches strings that are not URIs, and that should be quite obvious if you compare the grammar in that same RFC to the regex.

Yes, it does. And it is quite obvious if you compare the grammar to the regular expression.

Please show how to produce the following string (which is matched by that regex) from the grammar (without the quotes):

"%x"

(edit: actually, feel free to do it with the quotes included if you like, that would still be matched by that regex)